Memories That Keep Giving
Written by Alecs Kakon
Photos by Jen Fellegi
In my life I’ve dealt with a good amount of pain and suffering, all of which stemmed from my inability to process the traumas I experienced as a child. Immediately internalizing (or better said, repressing) the pain, certain memories tortured my soul and infiltrated into every aspect of my life. It felt as though finding a way to move through the pain was an impossible feat. I would look at happy people and think, ‘hey, there’s a foreign concept.’ I’ve wondered why some people can use their past as a way to springboard into the present whereas others stay stuck in the past, unable to heal. What’s that all about? Is it the way we process our traumas, both cognitively and emotionally, that allows us to eventually move past them? Or, Is it our biological makeup that determines if we even have the adequate programming to be capable of overcoming a painful experience? We all have a story, we have all had hardships. It’s what rounds us out and gives us depth of character, but why can some people move forward while others turn in circles. Sitting down with Neilly, one thing became clear: experiencing loss and overcoming illness were not moments she would ever choose to stay stuck in. Instead, she showed me how her painful moments were an exercise of will; the will to choose the good, the will to move on, and the will to look back, but only with a smile on her face.
Neilly lost her father at the age of 15. She remembers him coming home to walk the dog, go off to play squash, and then getting a phone call from the hospital to inform her that her father had had a heart attack. By the time she arrived at the hospital, he was gone. “I cried loudly,” she describes. “Like someone had literally punched me in the stomach. I lost my breath and then everything went blank.” As a young girl who had the picture-perfect parents—happily in love and smitten for each other—Neilly had never imagined that all at once her life could be turned upside down; “My childhood stopped,” she says. Looking back on it today, 20-some-odd years later, she admits that she “still hasn’t fully processed the loss. I just remember thinking, ‘but I just saw him today,’ and then ‘I just saw him yesterday,’ and I kept looking backwards as more and more time passed… it felt weird.” Time plays a tricky role in death, but for Neilly, rather than reliving constant iterations of the loss, she has manipulated time to stand still in her memory. By looking back and remembering her father at a time when he was happy, she has been able to preserve his memory and save a space for him in her past that is coloured with light: “It was just way too early, and it took time to process, but I know it happened in the right way.”
By repurposing a horrible loss and transforming it into something meaningful, Neilly tapped into a powerful skill: she exercises her will to freeze time yet still find a way to move forward. Many years later, Neilly would have an emergency surgery that kept her in and out of the hospital for 5 weeks. “It’s weird though because I always felt like my dad’s stay here was temporary, and it was. And then, I always knew I would get really sick, and I did.” At 27, Neilly had started losing an exorbitant amount of weight. With a pain in her side followed by an appendix rupture, Neilly found out that she had a tumour on what was then thought to be located on her kidney. When she eventually went in for distal pancreatectomy to remove the tumour from her pancreas, Neilly finally realized just how serious her condition was. “It took me a while to regain my strength and truthfully I got a little depressed,” Neilly says. “It was lonely and I had so many procedures done. It was hard.” After a rough year of mending herself back to full health, Neilly can’t explain how it all happened, but today she can draw a straight line from health to happiness.
Having felt immense sadness in her lifetime, Neilly sometimes finds herself in a bad place: “I can make myself crazy with paranoia, like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I talk to myself and I remind myself that I’m happy.” With a pragmatic husband who balances her sensitive side, Neilly maintains a steady path as she has learned that her life is best lived one day at a time.
To have lived through hardship builds character and wisdom. It allows you to see the world from many perspectives and forces your heart to open to possibilities. You have to search for meaning where there might have been mere unfortunate circumstance and you have to find a way to take a horribly painful time and use it to serve as a reminder of all you have to be grateful for. Maybe it was because she allowed time to pass before the loss set in, or maybe it’s because she was born with a constitution built to handle whatever life throws her way. All I know is that those simple words “I still haven’t fully processed it” hold more power to me than she could’ve known. I still haven’t fully processed it... and as the memory wades there in the past, time creates a space for growth. We grow older, we grow wiser, and we grow more capable of drawing sense from things that make no sense.
